Inside the Twisted World of Competitive Pokemon Battling

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Much more than catching them all.

By Kat Bailey

Back in the days of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, I joked about the joy of Pokemon Eugenics, and outlined the insane process of generating a battleworthy Pokemon. Five years on, that process remains much the same, and it's still every bit as twisted. Yes, twisted.

On the plus side though, "properly" raising a Pokemon is much easier than it used to be, even if it's still time consuming and more than a little tedious. With the advent of Pokemon X, it's even possible to see a Pokemon's base stats without having to manually keep track. It's a far cry from the earliest days of modern competitive Pokemon, when all a trainer had was a notebook, a bicycle, and a lot of patience.

The Early Days

In the very earliest days of Pokemon, we all thought we were masters. I certainly did, despite not really knowing the first thing about Pokemon battling. All I really knew was that Psychic types were the best Pokemon in the game, which made Starmie a monster in battle.

There was a little more to it than that though. There were hidden stats that could be trained and maximized, which only a select few elite players knew about. The rest of us caught our favorites, beat our friends, and patted ourselves on our backs. For Pokemon, it was sort of a period of innocence.

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Word got around about special hidden stats called 'Effort Values'.

When Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire came around in 2003 though, things changed. Suddenly there were personalities and abilities, which had the potential to completely change a Pokemon's role in battle. Gengar, for example, gained the ability "Levitate," which allowed it to avoid killer earthquakes, and become even more powerful in battle.

And there were new ways to train Pokemon as well. It wasn't long before word got around about special hidden stats called "Effort Values." The idea was that every Pokemon would yield a point in a stat like speed or attack, capping out at 252 for one stat, and 510 total. Investing all of those points in one stat could result in massive improvements, but at the expense of a lot of grinding.

See? Not complicated at all.

There were ways to hasten the process, of course. One was to drop some money on vitamins for a hundred free EV points. But ultimately, every serious Pokemon trainer had to grab a pen and paper, then drag their prospective champion out into the killing fields.

It was time consuming in the extreme, especially when factoring in breeding for the best possible base stats, which could take hours. In college, I would often sit reading a book, not even looking at the screen as I rode back and forth on my bike. When the egg hatched, I would level it up to 100 using rare candies to check its stats, then start again.

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I'm breeding Pokebabies with their grandchildren, pumping their offspring full of drugs, then building them up inch by inch through hours of brutal battling.

The process bred its own kind of humor. As I outlined in my "Eugenics Diary," it's kind of amazing to think that I'm breeding Pokebabies with their grandchildren, pumping their offspring full of drugs, then building them up inch by inch through hours of brutal battling. As I said, it's kind of twisted, and runs completely counter to the whole, "But they're your friends!" ethos of the series. I think the Pokemon people know it too, because there have been various winking nods to it in the anime series, as well as in the games themselves.

In any case, funny as it could be at times, "agonizing" is still a pretty good way to describe those days. But in the end, it was worth it for the satisfaction of knowing that you had the best possible monster. And it was worth it for the battling community, which would begin to find its voice in 2005.

The Rise of the Battling Community

Any illusions I had about being an elite battler came crashing down with the release of Ruby and Sapphire. In fact, I remember my first battle very clearly. In was in late 2003, when I discovered an IRC bot that made it possible to simulate Pokemon battles after poking around the IGN Pokemon boards.

Knowing literally nothing about the developments in Pokemon battling since the original game (I missed out on Gold and Silver), I built a team around some of my favorites from the Red and Blue days, and tossed in Absol for good measure. Looking at the available items, I figured it would be a good idea to put a Choice Band on Absol, and add in a boosting move like Swords Dance for good measure. Confident in my setup, I headed into my first ever battle... and was promptly annihilated.

You can probably guess what happened. I had Absol use Swords Dance, at which point I discovered that while Choice Band does boost attack by 1.5 percent, it also locks the Pokemon holding it into a single move. Needless to say, I was swept clean off the board. But I wasn't discouraged; rather, I wanted to really learn the ins and outs of Pokemon battling, and eventually become a top battler in my own right.

In those days, IRC was kind of the gateway to true competitive battling, as well as the foundation of the then-nascent Pokemon battling community. The ability to instantly input a team made it possible to experiment with stat spreads, movesets, and Pokemon combinations. And this being an era before online play became possible, it was also a great opportunity to find an actual battling community and build up one's skills.

In 2004, IRC gave way to the first every graphical battle simulator -- Netbattle. It wasn't a perfect simulator, but it still represented a massive forward for the community, since it replaced intimidating walls of text with a graphical user interface. Soon after, a new community called Smogon was born, which served to unite the disparate elements of the battling community under one umbrella.

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The VGCs came with acknowledgement that EV Training and breeding for proper base stats were a legitimate way to play the game.

But it wasn't until Pokemon Diamond and Pearl arrived in 2007 that competitive battling that we know it today really began to take off. It was with Diamond and Pearl that online play found its way to the series proper, and the whole world began to discover the joys of competitive battling. Pretty soon, more people than ever were on their bikes hatching eggs, hoping to breed the one Pokemon that would let them take top prize in a forum tournament, or simply embarrass their friends.

Along with proper online play came official sponsorship by Game Freak and the Pokemon Company. In 2009, Game Freak held the first Video Game Championships, formalizing the scattered promotional competitions they had run from 2005 onward. The VGCs came with acknowledgement that EV Training and breeding for proper base stats were a legitimate way to play the game, and very quietly, Game Freak began to introduce new ways to breed Pokemon.

All the sudden, competitive Pokemon had hit the big time.

The Modern Era

Not that the competitive Pokemon community wasn't developing a few tools of their own.

Needing to churn out Pokemon quickly, but aware of how time-consuming it was to breed a Pokemon even with the proper tools, Smogon turned to random number generators. By playing around with the Nintendo DS' internal clock, Smogon was able to create a Pokemon with perfect stats in the space of an hour -- a process that would ordinarily take much, much longer. And since they didn't set off any of Nintendo's cheat detectors, they were clear to use in events like the VGCs.

For everyone else, Nintendo sprinked in helpful tools like the Everstone and Power items, which would lock certain stats and make it easier to breed. In Pokemon Black/White 2, the Join Avenue made it possible to train up a Pokemon without even setting foot into the proverbial killing fields, provided a trainer had a lot of money on hand. And in a stunning development for the series, Pokemon X/Y actually makes EVs visible for the first time, while also offering minigames that makes it possible to build them up without battling wild monsters.

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Pokemon X/Y actually makes EVs visible for the first time.

This is kind of an amazing turn for Game Freak, who up to now have preferred to keep the process relatively ambiguous. The idea was to keep Pokemon training as "natural" as possible, and to avoid turning it into a mechanical process. Now though, with the VGCs getting bigger and bigger, the limiters seem to be off.

This democratization of competitive Pokemon battling offers some tantalizing possibilities for a series that has been content for so long to hide its depth under a lay of obfuscating sweetness. For those who have grown bored of merely trying to "catch them all," a new route is suddenly open that has the potential to add hundreds of hours to their experience. And with elements like EV Training now relatively out in the open, more people than ever will be tempted to jump into the wild but fascinating world of competitive battling.

The rest of us will remember all those hours spent building teams online, saving money to buy vitamins, and riding back and forth to hatch eggs. At it worst, it was an agonizingly slow grindfest, but at the end of the day, all that work endeared the resulting Pokemon to me in a way that no other RPG can really replicate. It's a relationship that I would argue is unique to video games in general. Not even World of WarCraft, with its hundreds of hours of dungeon crawling and loot collection, really comes close. After shedding so much sweat and tears on a single character, you can't help but take pride in your creation, real or not.

In short, even if I don't miss the days of Ruby and Sapphire, when breeding and training a Pokemon was a lot of grinding and guesswork, I have no regrets.

Kat Bailey is a freelance Pokemon Master. You can follow her on Twitter at @The_Katbot.